I’ve lived in Boston for 17 years now - we moved here when my eldest was 9 months old. Along the way, I’ve watched many of our friends with kids of similar age move out of Boston for the suburbs “for the schools.” I understand the impulse completely. More resources, less complexity, calmer hallways. My wife and I made a different choice, though. We wanted our kids to grow up in a genuinely diverse environment, and we also wanted them to go to an academically rigorous school.

Boston Latin School is one of the rare places that can offer both. Founded in 1635, it is the oldest public school in the country. Its alumni roster includes John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin (though he never actually graduated), Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Leonard Bernstein. It also has an admissions process - there is more demand than supply. For decades, it has also been a political lightning rod for a quintessentially American debate: who gets to go there? More broadly, how do we balance merit and equity?

I came to that question with a vested interest and a specific lens. I’d spent most of my career as a software engineer, thinking in algorithms and edge cases. When a policy gets its math obviously wrong, I have a visceral reaction.

Two Bad Words…?

“Merit” and “equity” have become, unfortunately, politically radioactive terms. To the right, “equity” is code for performative quotas and reverse racism. To the left, “merit” is code for the preservation of systemic privilege rooted in historical racism. This kind of binary absolutism is genuinely unfortunate. A healthy tension between these worthy ideals is, in my opinion, at the heart of the unique appeal of the American dream. If “merit” ignores systemic barriers, it becomes a gatekeeper for privilege. If “equity” is pursued without rigor, it creates new and unintended forms of unfairness, and often drives the very families who might have been its advocates right out of the public system.

The “Crisis” as a Catalyst

Before the pandemic, Boston used a single citywide pool for exam school admissions: a ranked list of all city students, weighted 50% grades and 50% exam score. It was a pure merit-based system that ignored any consideration of equity and the vast socioeconomic disparities across the city. Unsurprisingly, the incoming class at BLS did not look much like Boston as a whole. An entire cottage industry had sprung up to help (mostly wealthier families) prepare for the ISEE exam which was used in the process, administered on a Saturday, and not aligned with the public school curriculum.

When COVID-19 hit and health restrictions prevented administration of the exam, BPS followed the old political adage: never let a good crisis go to waste. They scrapped the old system and a “task force” proposed a new model, ostensibly with the idea of having a more balanced and diverse student body in the exam schools. The intent was sound. The execution was not.

The new policy split the city into eight socioeconomic tiers using census data. Each tier was allocated seats based on the number of potential (not actual) applicants. A new test, the MAP Growth, was introduced. And most confoundingly, a ten-point bonus awarded to any applicant attending a Title I school (defined as any school where more than 40% of students receive government assistance), regardless of which neighborhood that student lived in.

On the margins, the policy produced genuinely absurd results. Several schools fell just barely on either side of the Title I threshold. A single second-grader transferring in could tip a school across the line, determining whether any of its sixth-graders would have a realistic shot at BLS.

The Math Didn’t Add Up

After the first admissions cycle under the new system, I sat down with the publicly available BPS data to see how the policy was actually performing. I was flabbergasted.

In “Tier 8” (the most affluent socioeconomic tier), the ten-point school bonus had created a mathematical ceiling. For a high-performing student at a non-Title I school, getting into BLS required a score above 100. That’s not a figure of speech; it was a literal mathematical impossibility. The policy hadn’t leveled the playing field. It had tilted it so far in the other direction that it produced a new form of exclusion. It didn’t make it hard for a large number of students to get into BLS - it made it impossible.

My own analysis suggested the natural academic gap between socioeconomic tiers was closer to one or two points, not ten. When I later spoke with people involved in drafting the policy, I asked how they had landed on the number ten. The answer: it was round. Not derived from data. Not modeled against outcomes. Just a round number that sounded reasonable to someone in a room. I found it genuinely strange that the institution responsible for teaching Boston’s children to use evidence and reasoning had simply declined to apply either to this particular problem. And that me - a random guy crunching numbers with no stake in the development of this policy - seemed to be the first person to publicly identify the absurdity of this reality.

A Warm Night in October

I wrote up my findings in a memo (specific, data-driven, with a concrete proposal) and signed up to present at a public School Committee meeting. On a warm fall evening, I rode my bike downtown and walked into a large auditorium that was already filling up.

I’ll be honest: I didn’t go in expecting much. I had no experience in politics at any level, and my assumption was that we’d see passionate testimony, polite nods…and no perceptible change. I was passionate about what I was set to propose, but politics, I assumed, would matter more than logic.

My name was called, I walked to the microphone, and walked through the math as plainly as I could, and sat back down. The meeting moved on to the next speaker. When the public comment period ended, I gathered my things and headed for the door.

That’s when a committee member appeared beside me in the hallway. “I really like your idea,” he said. “It makes a lot of sense.”

He asked for my number. I gave it to him, still a little disoriented. And I rode home that night feeling something I genuinely hadn’t anticipated: like it had actually mattered.

Over the following months, we talked several times as BPS began the actual work of analyzing data to refine the policy. He became a genuine champion of the proposal, navigating it through the committee with the kind of quiet persistence that rarely makes the news. In early 2023, the School Committee voted to adopt it.

The Result: Iteration Works

Governance is rarely fast, but Boston’s experience with exam school admissions is a case study in something rarer still: a public institution that kept listening. After this initial policy change, BPS continued to present admissions data publicly after each cycle, and parents and advocates from across the political spectrum continued to show up and push for refinement.

That kind of sustained engagement matters, and it isn’t easy. Every policy change creates ripple effects. Families plan their lives around these systems, and the risk of unintended consequences is real. Changing course requires institutional humility that is genuinely hard to find in any governing body. But the School Committee proved willing to follow the data, even when that meant acknowledging that an earlier decision needed revision. After a few more admissions cycles, the committee made another round of changes that I believe have finally struck the right balance:

  • The first 20% of seats at each exam school are now awarded to the highest-ranking students citywide, regardless of where they live. This preserves the “merit” core of these institutions.
  • The remaining seats are distributed across four tiers (simplified from eight), determined by ZIP-code-level census data.
  • No more bonus points. Three years of data showed that the tiered system itself provided a sufficient equity lever, without handicaps that distorted outcomes.

This is how public institutions should work: transparent data, open process, willingness to iterate.

Why This Matters

What I took from this experience is less about exam schools specifically and more about what civic participation can actually look like when it works. You don’t need to be a politician or a professional advocate. You need a clear idea, solid evidence, and if you’re lucky, someone on the inside willing to carry it forward.

I also came away with more hope than I walked in with. The cynicism that carried me into that auditorium wasn’t entirely wrong. These processes are slow, politics does matter, and plenty of good proposals die quietly in hallways just like the one where I was stopped. But the pragmatic middle ground is findable, even on something as charged as this. The key is to treat it as a design problem rather than an ideological one.

Whether we are talking about Boston schools or the federal tax code, the goal should be the same: build systems that are simple, transparent, and honest about the tradeoffs they are making. Then watch the data, and adjust. We don’t need sycophancy or dogma. We just need to do the math.